The Jester of Testing

Trump is now calling himself the "King of Ventilators." Testing? Not so much.

That “broken system”? Trump broke it.

As regular readers know, I’m pretty effing sick of the way President Notmyfault keeps trying to redirect the blame for his incompetent response to the threat of the coronavirus. My first post on the topic was on February, 26, when even Tucker Carlson was calling out Trump’s complete lack of preparedness. My March 17 post was actually titled, “Failure to Test.”

But Trump, of course, is still at it. Yesterday he again blamed Obama for not having the tests for COVID-2019 prepared and sitting on a shelf for him when he took office in 2017.

He whines and moans about “inheriting a broken system” as if Sean Hannity has actually convinced him that’s a true thing.

So let’s go over it one more time:

The system worked for H1NI.

It worked for Ebola.

It worked for Zika.

Obama improved it further.

Obama set up a pandemic response team inside the White House.

Obama gave Trump the playbook to follow.

Obama walked Trump’s team though it step-by-step.

Trump and his fourth-rate appointees are the ones who broke it.

Trump is the one who ignored every warning, politicized the issue and downplayed the threat until it was too big to ignore. Tragically, we now know that if Trump had acted just two weeks sooner on social distancing, ten times fewer Americans would have died.

America’s shameful testing failure

As The New York Times reported yesterday, the C.D.C. completely botched the rollout of national testing kits and:

To this day, the C.D.C.’s singular failure symbolizes how unprepared the federal government was in the early days to combat a fast-spreading outbreak of a new virus and it also highlights the glaring inability at the onset to establish a systematic testing policy that would have revealed the still unknown rates of infection in many regions of the country. The blunders are posing new problems as some states with few cases agitate to reopen and others remain in virtual lockdown with cases and deaths still climbing.

Today, America—the country with the most cases and the most deaths anywhere in the world—ranks 42nd in its national testing rate, having tested less than 1.2% of the population. That’s behind countries such as Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Latvia and Qatar.

Trump’s own idiocy is obviously the number one cause of this abysmal performance. But installing incompetent idealogue Dr. Robert Redfield to lead the C.D.C. in 2018 didn’t help either—even at the time, Redfield was seen as an “abysmal choice”.

Trump is now, ridiculously, proclaiming himself the “King of Ventilators.” But that can’t obscure the fact he remains The Jester of Testing.

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